Alexa in Space

My team and I sent Alexa to the Moon and back as part of NASA’s Artemis I mission. We partnered with Lockheed Martin and Webex by Cisco to demonstrate the potential of voice technology to support astronauts on future space missions.

While the mission was only 26 days, getting there took years of collaboration with NASA and our partner teams. Everyone had to hit their marks perfectly as we only had a two-hour window each day to communicate with the spacecraft.

We built three separate experiences for the mission. First we built a physical command module onboard the Orion spacecraft with Alexa built into it to withstand the radiation and force of space travel. We communicated with it in real-time 280,000 miles from Earth from a custom-built studio inside Mission Control at Johnson Space Center. Next we built a simulation script and experience for “Virtual Crew Members” to speak with Alexa onboard the spacecraft as if they were in the commander seat. Finally, we created an at-home experience for Alexa customers to be able to follow along with the mission in ways never before seen. NASA granted a third party real-time access to spacecraft telemetry for the first time ever, which let us feed live data to Alexa.

The results were incredible and historic. I led the creative, marketing, and user-experience teams through this once-in-a-lifetime project. We captured celebrities like Taraji P. Henson and Nick Jonas, STEM teachers (and students), and even Amazon customers using Alexa to control a spacecraft in deep space.